Sen. Zaffirini among co-executors facing Webb County civil suit

By Michelle Casady :
July 3, 2013
: Updated: July 3, 2013 10:35pm

Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, is one of three co-executors of a family estate that's in dispute.

A civil lawsuit filed Wednesday afternoon in Webb County alleges the three co-executors of a family estate — among them state Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo — mismanaged the trusts' assets and ended up wrongfully taking control of “millions of dollars of real property.”

Attorney Carlos Zaffirini, who's married to Judith and is representing all the defendants in the case, called the claims groundless.

“They've been trying to break the trust ... for years,” he said. “Their ultimate purpose is to get the money away from the trustees to squander it and do what they please.”

Some of the specific claims in the suit are that the executors gave themselves “excessive compensation of $420,000” for overseeing the estate, paid “unreasonable and unnecessary attorney's fees of $44,564” and that they still owe $377,681 to Guerra and her family.

Zaffirini denied the allegations made against his clients.

“They make it sound like they're mismanaging the funds for self benefit and it's just false,” he said. “If you take the value of all the partnerships and you take the value of all the compensation for the three of them, they are getting less than one percent of the value of the estate.”

A message left for San Antonio attorney Thomas Bassler, who's representing Guerra, wasn't returned Wednesday afternoon.